Language Segregation in U.S. Metro Areas

Tiffany Julian, U.S. Census Bureau

The United States has incredible language diversity. The U.S. Census Bureau tabulates over 300 languages spoken by an estimated 60 million people. The purpose of this research is to achieve three goals: 1) Compare residential segregation patterns between language groups within cities and between cities by language group. 2) Fill a gap in the literature by analyzing language groups rather than racial and ethnic groups. 3) Use the 2006-2010 American Community Survey to proved the most current data possible about languages spoken in the United States. This poster will focus on a subset of substantively interesting languages and metropolitan areas across the many Census regions. Residential segregation will be measured using three indexes of segregation- the Dissimilarity Index, the Isolation index, and Delta. These indexes will allow us to look at social and spatial distance between language groups in metropolitan areas and identify unusual language patterns.